Indications point to more and grander military interventions under a President Clinton.

One of Hillary Clinton's top national security advisers, Michael Morell (who also happens to be the former acting director of the CIA), told the staunchly pro-Clinton think tank the Center for American Progress that the upcoming U.S. presidential election provides a "great opportunity for the next president of the United States to go to the Middle East and say 'We're back, we're going to lead again.'"

And what might the leadership that the Hillary Clinton administration imposes on a region halfway around the world look like?

Juxtaposing against what he must perceive as a lack of leadership from his former boss, President Barack Obama, Morell said:

I would have no problem, from a policy perspective, of having U.S. Navy board those ships and if there's weapons on them for the Houthis, turn those ships around and send those ships back to Iran. I think that's the kind of action, tough action that would get the attention of the Iranians and will get the attention of our friends in the region to say the Americans are now serious about helping us deal with this problem.

Make no mistake, what Morell just proposed is an act of war, which Bloomberg's Eli Lake aptly characterized as "something you might hear this month in an alternate reality, from the Rubio-Cheney campaign." And if Clinton supporters think war with Iran is necessary or an exercise in "smart power," that's their right, but they should at least be honest about it. As Reason's Nick Gillespie wrote, "a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war."

But if one of her most senior national security advisers is willing to openly engage in this kind of saber-rattling while smilingly declaring, "We're back," it's fair to expect more and grander military intervention under a President Clinton than we've experienced under President Obama.

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Richman’s at least somewhat readable as long as he steers clear of any topic even remotely connected to Israel (TEH JOOZ!), and refrains from comparing murdered Navy SEALs to mass murderers. And Shika’s OK as long as she avoids Trump and immigration. Chapman, OTOH, is always pure DERP.

Scuds aren’t accurate enough to hit a moving ship, and the flight pattern in the video wasn’t indicative of a ballistic missile. It was either a C-802, or C-701, manufactured by China and used by Iran. Not Yemen.

As for smuggling them, they have caught fishing boats with weapons, and the Mandeb Strait is still open to commercial vessels. Seeing how the IRGC is quite good at that sort of thing, it isn’t that surprising.

Of course Iran is supporting the Houthis. The Houthis serve their interests. The Houthis aren’t proxies, but willing to accept help wherever they can. They give Iran the chance to bloody the Saudis right on their border while maintaining plausible deniability.

As for Wikileaks, they are now worthless as an unbiased source. Assange is seething with rage and has been locked in the same room for over three years now. He’s out for revenge, not truth.

Just started reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It’s pretty crazy that some British officers was running around the Arabian Peninsula in WWI trying to tell them that divisions between tribes would leave the door wide open for the the super powers to come in and start pulling puppet strings.

Iran’s got no incentive to support those Imams #7-#12 denying heretics, apart from antagonizing Saudi Arabia, and the only proof of Iran doing so is Saudi Arabia saying so and promising that it’s being truthful.

I have my doubts. I read once that their navy was restricted to 8-5 operations because the Saudis couldn’t stoop to actual hands-on maintenance, so all that had to be handled back in port by foreigners. A friend working over there said it was amazing how averse the Saudis were to any kind of hands-on work, relying on foreigners.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t a few Saudis who could maintain nukes, but if the general populations thinks actual physical work is beneath contempt, it doesn’t bode well for support structure.

Supposedly there’s a gentlemen’s agreement between Saudis and Pakistan. Saudis helped finance Pakistani nukes, with the understanding that they can help themselves if necessary (e.g. Iran gets nukes and US tells Saudis to get fucked).

Does anybody follow the Saudi Yemen conflict on social media? I got to hand it to the houthis.. they have some pluck. Most fight barefooted and are kicking the crap out of high tech Saudi weaponry. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_KeMSIRtQ

The ones that align with her and the government having more power than it did before, with exceptions in place for her and her criminal network. Whether it’s taxes or guns, there are some things that we can reliably assume she won’t budge on. Granted there is no value that will long survive being a threat to her holding power, it’s just that some leftisms will never really threaten that.

Are you *sure*? I’m pretty sure Shikha said something slightly different at some point. I think it was titled “Trump Will Blow Up The World”, or “Inevitable Nuclear Trump Doom Shitstorm” or something like that.

that said

One of Hillary Clinton’s top national security advisers, Michael Morell (who also happens to be the former acting director of the CIA)

also! the guy who re-wrote the Benghazi talking points. Nothing at all coincidental about that. No sir.

I know Benghazi has become something of a joke on the left as synonymous with “nothingburger-fake-skandal”, but the fact is that it entailed smuggling weapons from one regime-overthrowing (Libya) orchestrated by Hillary’s state departmet to a second one (Syria), which she’s also had a direct hand in. And those 2 actions have cost how many civilian lives, and done what positive things for “the region”, exactly?

That will be different, because all of the people that Hillary doesn’t blow up will get to come to Murika. Donald will just leave the orphans out in the sand. You know if you’re going to kill people on a massive scale, you gotta save a few chillins to prove how caring you are.

She’ll have the support of upwards of 2/3rds of Congress if she starts a war with Iran. But I’m interested in seeing what sort of alliance forms between anti-war Republicans like Rand Paul and Democrats like Ron Wyden.

Not every Democrat in Congress is a complete tool when it comes to this subject since a lot of voters really don’t want more war.

It doesn’t matter what voters want. They already voted and they’re going to get what they voted for, good and hard. And you’re right, if Hillary wants to go on with her war mongering and you know she does, she will get congressional approval. We’ll be hearing ‘Iran cannot get nuclear weapons’ loud and often.

Why would her opponent call her on a topic he knows absolutely nothing about? It’s not incoherence, it’s total ignorance.

Also it’s been firmly established that actions can be taken, she can invent narratives, one can have nothing to do with the other, and she, in no way, will be held culpable. If “What difference, at this point, does it make?” gets traction in a Congressional hearing, what’s a candidate, especially and outsider, gonna do?

The conspiracy nuts are mumbling about Hillary and Obama being part of a conspiracy to bring down America as a superpower. They aren’t looking so nutty anymore. Isnt this an Alinskyite tactic? To overwhelm the system?

I hear Hillary is a big fan of Alinsky. Maybe it’s a conspiracy theory, but Hillary clearly wants an oligarchy where the leaders are in no way constrained by the plebes. Things have to be pretty fucked up before people will accept that. You start wars all over the planet and then bring millions of the survivors here. If only a few of those survivors decide to exact revenge on the people who blew up their country, that could create enough chaos to declare martial law and suspend elections, forever. I mean it seems intentional to me.

I’ve been thinking lately – the first time I ever heard the US referred to as “World Police,” it was from Al Gore.

This was maybe 1994 or so, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It had been long enough that conversation had turned toward “gosh, without a USSR, do we really need to spend as much as we do on the military anymore?”

The answer from the peace-loving Clinton administration and polar-bear-hugging Al Gore as “hell yes, we do!”

There was a blithering speech from Gore about how he had a vision for the American military as “world police,” and this is connected in my memory to the US involvement in Somalia.

I’ve tried googling this, but can’t find it. Anybody else remember this, or can link to it? Or did I dream it?

If it’s real, Democrats misty-eyed over the lost utopia that would have been the Gore presidency need to have it thrown at them with great frequency.

The Navy is the only arm of the military that, IMHO, should have reach beyond our physical borders. Protecting U.S. merchant ships in international waters is a valid job for the Navy – but hardly one I’d conflate with “world police”.

I think that’s the kind of action, tough action that would get the attention of the Iranians

Has Hillary made any public comments about the Iran “Nuclear Deal”? Wasn’t the whole point of that thing to ‘open up diplomatic channels’ and set the stage for re-integrating Iran into normalized relations with the world?…. or was it really all just shits & giggles for Obama to pretend he was a peacemaker?

(*yes, i’m presuming the latter, but she had to have said something about it)

The NYT covered her position last November

Mrs. Clinton’s speech, at the Brookings Institution, amounted to a strong endorsement of the deal struck by President Obama and her successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, though one laced with skepticism about Iran’s intentions. …Most of her speech and discussion afterward was an effort to navigate a careful line between claiming credit for the Iran deal while also expressing skepticism by positioning herself as tougher than her former boss …Mrs. Clinton’s promise that her approach to the Iranians would be to “confront them across the board”…. she said, the deal must be the starting point of a new American containment strategy.

Does any comparable saber-rattler advise Trump? If not, does this not cement not only Trump’s superiority as a prez choice on foreign policy, but the absolute (not just relative) badness of Clinton likewise?

And since I’ve very reason to think this isn’t so much advice by Morell to Clinton as it is public cover for orders that flowed the other way, and that Hillary would have no substantial reason to take that side other than bribery, and since there’s no reason she’d be less susceptible to bribery in domestic affairs, this means she’s running for the position of graft-taker-in-chief.

The short answer seems to be, “He ignores them” and/or doesn’t have any.

Its possible that you could take this as a “good thing”. Or not. The fact is that what presidents say during campaigns is always pretty much mostly bullshit, but Trump has in general hit more “we should stay out of conflicts we have no interests in”-notes, and said things like “who needs NATO?” than other presidents in the past.

OT and probably already mentioned elsewhere: Jerry Brown signed the bill latching onto the Obamacare funding formula – making the healthy pay into a pool the sick are drawing from – but he’s doing it with the broke-ass California retirement system. I can’t see any problem with a law requiring private employers to pay into a state system the state system managers have managed to bankrupt to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars. Can you?

He’s not known as Moonbeam without reason. Remember what he said about the min wage thing they passed? Something to the effect of ‘this is bad economic policy, but the right thing to do’. So I suppose it’s gonna be more of that type of derp with this one. We’re destroying the economy, but it feelz good!

In response to criticisms regarding funding a new entitlement program, we were told not to worry, because most people won’t ever actually see benefits from it. It’s just stealing from poor people. Oops – did we say that out loud?

Jerry passing a $15 minimum wage wasn’t out of “feel good” gesturism – have no doubt that he found a way to guide some of that cash towards himself and his cronies.

For the uninitiated, ‘Governor Moonbeam’ became Mr. Brown’s intractable sobriquet, dating back to his days as governor between 1975 and 1983, when his state led the nation in pretty much everything ? its economy, environmental awareness and, yes, class-A eccentrics.

The nickname was coined by Mike Royko, the famed Chicago columnist, who in 1976 said that Mr. Brown appeared to be attracting “the moonbeam vote,” which in Chicago political parlance meant young, idealistic and nontraditional.

The term had a nice California feel, and Mr. Royko eventually began applying it when he wrote about the Golden State’s young, idealistic and nontraditional chief executive. He found endless amusement ? and sometimes outright agita ? in California’s oddities, calling the state “the world’s largest outdoor mental asylum.”

Make no mistake, what Morell just proposed is an act of war, which Bloomberg’s Eli Lake aptly characterized as “something you might hear this month in an alternate reality, from the Rubio-Cheney campaign.”

Question for the group:

How much more warmongering do we have to hear from mainstream Democrats before mainstream Democrats quit characterizing it as something we only hear from Republicans.